The Trials of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami (interesting novels to read txt) 📕

she felt an affinity to the city, to Italy, the Pope and God. She converted to Catholicism to give meaning to her life. ‘I came to believe in the survival of the spirit’, she said. ‘I think I was getting old enough to realise that roads with no signposts sometimes lead nowhere.’

Ernest Troubridge had signposts she recognized: he had white hair, height, age. His forebears were admirals and army men. ‘Yield to no difficulties’ was the family motto. He had joined the navy and accrued promotions and honours: Captain and Chief of Staff Mediterranean 1907–8; Chief of the War Staff, Admiralty 1911–12.; Grand Order of the Rising Sun; Officer of Legion of Honour; Gold Medal of Order of Imtiaz … His first marriage was to a Canadian, Edith Duffus, in 1891. She died nine years later after the stillborn birth of their fourth child.

Una hoped for a surrogate father. ‘Young men failed to interest me which was sad.’ What she got was a husband aged forty-six, syphilis, three teenage stepchildren who loathed her, and the blighting of her artistic hopes. Troubridge met her ‘by appointment’ in London, proposed, then married her in Venice in October 1908. On her marriage certificate, Una gave as her occupation Sculptor. She had a honeymoon in Paris. They stayed at the Hôtel Normande, where Una was ‘grievously ill’. Troubridge then sailed to Malta for two years.

In a stark outburst in her diary some twenty-four years later, she wrote of how, had he thought about it, knowing he had syphilis, he would not have deceived a ‘pure’ girl, and blighted her life with an incurable disease. ‘He had no right to marry. Especially to marry a healthy girl young enough to be his daughter. And I should have escaped 14 years of invalidism and its after effects.’

For years she monitored her treatments for this infection: daily visits to doctors, referral to gynaecologists, injections, vaccines and analyses of smears. It made her disgusted with him and herself, hypochondriacal about every symptom of ill-health, rejecting of her daughter, whom she considered tainted like herself, and disdainful of everything to do with sex. ‘The physical never mattered to me anyway after the first misery’, she wrote when she was fifty-seven.

It was her disposition to do battle and to seem to succeed. She took on the role of marriage as if playing a part. ‘Having chosen for my husband a man old enough to be my father I set to work to try to look his age. I shiver when I look back and remember the sweeping black velvets and purple facecloths of that period of altruistic effort.’

Troubridge, a stickler for the proprieties of his position, wanted her compliance. She was the naval officer’s wife. She called him Zip and ‘my man’, lunched on board ship, was a spectator at polo matches between the army and navy and endured tea dances, cricket matches and dull dinners. It was all a charade. ‘Troubridge brought me no spiritual development,’ she wrote, ‘no evolution, no kindness … I should not have been sidetracked into marrying at all.’

She had an ectopic pregnancy in 1909 then, a year later, after forty-eight hours’ labour, gave birth to her only daughter, Andrea. She desperately wanted her to be healthy, but apart from a preoccupation with symptoms of illness and an assiduous watch on the servants, had no desire for relationship with her child. ‘Gradually and infallibly, bit by bit, she brought me to the realisation that there was nothing in her whole make-up that was not alien to mine.’

Una spent days in bed with nervous headaches and ‘heart attacks’. Nor could she get on with Troubridge’s relatives. She wrote of the ‘tyranny of kinship’. He housed her, Andrea and his stepchildren at 107 St George’s Square in London. The arrangement lasted a hellish year. He then, in November 1912, asked his sister Laura if she would take in his daughter Mary because ‘she and Una are like oil and vinegar’.

Laura wrote novels and books on etiquette and thought the modern girl had lost a sense of values. She had kept a family diary of childhood, adored her brother and deplored his domestic problems, but did not feel able to foster his child. Troubridge took a separate house in Durham Place, near St George’s Square, for his adolescent daughters and unmarried sisters. His son, Thomas, joined the navy in the Troubridge tradition and Una was isolated in a house on her own with Cub, as she called her daughter.

By January 1913, on her sister Viola’s recommendation, she was having treatment with a Harley Street psychotherapist, Dr Hugh Crichton-Miller, author of Hypnotism and Disease and Treatment by Hypnotism and Suggestion. A smooth man, consulted mainly by ladies with money, time and unsatisfactory husbands, Crichton-Miller founded the Tavistock Clinic for Functional Nervous Disorders in London and ran a large private nursing home on his fourteen-acre estate, Bowden House, at Harrow on the Hill. (Viola was unhappily married to a journalist, Maurice Woods. ‘It is horribly tragic,’ Crichton-Miller wrote of her to Una with less than professional confidence, ‘to be sacrificed and broken to a thing [her husband] that is all brain and no heart’.)

Crichton-Miller was another father figure, the ‘higher power’ which Una sought. She paid to find from him the ‘evolution, spiritual development and kindness’ her husband failed to provide. He told her she was ‘repressing some big complexes’ and that her self-confidence would grow when she learned the power of thought control. ‘Confidence in yourself is the goal to be aimed at’, he said. He wrote to her while she was away, taught her ‘self-inducing hypnosis’, which she practised in twenty-minute sessions twice a day, hypnotized her into unconsciousness for no very clear reason and sent large bills to Troubridge – thirteen guineas a week plus ‘incidental expenses’.

Psychotherapy absorbed her in 1913. In her diary she chronicled her ‘seances’ of loss of consciousness and the psychology textbooks she read – The Psychology of Suggestion by William James, Hypnotism